Some of the resistance to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence boils down to conservatism, which many scientists adopt in order to minimize the number of mistakes they make during their careers. This is the path of least resistance, and it works; scientists who preserve their images in this way receive more honors, more awards, and more fun

Long before I confronted the evidence presented by ‘Oumuamua, I had learned that across all facets of life, taking the evidence presented to you and pursuing it with wonder, humility, and determination can change everything—if, that is, you are open to the possibilities contained in the data.

Very often, what sets an astrophysicist’s detective story in motion is the discovery of an anomaly in experimental or observational data, a piece of evidence that does not follow our expectations and that cannot be explained by what we know. In such situations, it is common practice to propose a variety of alternative explanations and then rule the

What stands in our way of the fair consideration of ‘Oumuamua being of extraterrestrial design isn’t the evidence or the method of its collection or the reasoning behind the hypothesis. What most immediately stands in our way is a reluctance to look past the evidence and reasoning at what should follow. Sometimes the problem lies with the message,

Surrounded by the technological comforts of the twenty-first century, scientists imagine ourselves the descendants of Galileo rather than the descendants of the men (it was entirely men) who muzzled him. But that is an error akin to a scientist cherry-picking data. Our civilization is the product of not just our scientific advances but also those m

Pascal’s reasoning ran as follows: If it turns out that God doesn’t exist, you have only given up a few pleasures during your lifetime. If God does exist, however, you gain heaven and with it an infinity of rewards. You also avoid the worst of all possible outcomes: an eternity in hell. In much the same way, I would argue, humanity bets its future

The data we confront tells us that ‘Oumuamua was a luminous, thin disk at the LSR, and when it encountered the gravitational pull of the Sun, it deviated from a trajectory explicable by gravity alone, and it did so without visible outgassing or disintegration. These data points can be summed up as follows: ‘Oumuamua was statistically a wild outlier

while we cannot control the data that the universe provides, we can control how we go about seeking it, assessing it, and recalibrating our future scientific undertakings. The world of possibilities to which we choose to open ourselves, bounded by the evidence we collect and that we allow our collective intelligence to consider, very much determine

One of the most difficult lessons to impart to young scientists is that the search for the truth can run counter to the search for consensus. Indeed, truth and consensus must never be conflated.